CAMPUS PROJECT CENTER PRINT AND ONLINE CULTURES IN THE MODERN NEWSPAPER A Major Qualifying Project Submitted to the faculty of Worcester Polytechnic Institute in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Science Submitted By: Lawrence G. Scharpf Submitted To: Project Advisor: John Trimbur Date: April 27, 2006 http://users.wpi.edu/~scharpf [email protected] Abstract _______________________________________________________________ 4 Chapter 1: Introduction __________________________________________________ 5 Chapter 2. History of Newsroom and Online Cultures _________________________ 14 Newspaper History _____________________________________________________ 15 Newspapers Before Electronic media _________________________________________ 15 Newspapers in the Age of Television and Radio ________________________________ 18 Newspapers in the Age of the Internet ________________________________________ 21 Newsroom Professional Authority ___________________________________________ 23 Internet History________________________________________________________ 29 The Early Years __________________________________________________________ 29 The Utopian 1990's________________________________________________________ 31 The Internet as Mass Media ________________________________________________ 33 Chapter 3. The Modern Newsroom and the Postmodern Internet ________________ 35 Modernism vs. Postmodernism____________________________________________ 36 Newsroom Ethos _______________________________________________________ 41 Professional Training______________________________________________________ 41 Scholarly Background _____________________________________________________ 42 Veteran Status ___________________________________________________________ 43 Web Development Ethos _________________________________________________ 44 Format Comparison: The Page and the Screen ______________________________ 47 The Printed Page _________________________________________________________ 48 The Computer Screen _____________________________________________________ 50 Readers vs. Users_______________________________________________________ 52 Chapter 4: Ethnography and the Infocenter _________________________________ 55 Pre-Telegram & Gazette Preparation_________________________________________ 55 Initial Expectations and Perceptions__________________________________________ 56 Ethnography at the Telegram & Gazette ______________________________________ 59 The Newsroom_________________________________________________________ 62 How the Newsroom Views Itself _____________________________________________ 63 The Online Department _________________________________________________ 66 How the Online Department Views Itself ______________________________________ 68 The Audience__________________________________________________________ 74 The Audience - The Newsroom ______________________________________________ 75 The Audience - The Online Department_______________________________________ 78 The News _____________________________________________________________ 83 The News - The Newsroom _________________________________________________ 84 The News -The Online Department __________________________________________ 87 How the Departments View Each Other ____________________________________ 91 How the Online Department Views the Newsroom ______________________________ 91 How the Newsroom Views the Online Department ______________________________ 97 Chapter 5: Conclusions ________________________________________________ 100 Appendix A: Infocenter ________________________________________________ 103 Appendix B: Infocenter Brochure ________________________________________ 105 Works Cited __________________________________________________________ 109 Abstract The "Print and Online Cultures in the Modern Newsroom" MQP examined the office cultures surrounding the newsroom and online department at the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. The perceptions of the newsroom and the online department towards themselves, the news, their audience, and ultimately each other were analyzed within the framework of professional authority, postmodernism and modernism. The acknowledgement of these perceptions will provide the first steps in reconciling the differences in the two offices' worldviews. Chapter 1: Introduction “Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets." -Napoleon Bonaparte There is a conflict today in the modern newsroom. The end of an era is seemingly upon the thousands of reporters, photographers, and editors who comprise this institution. For decades, the newspaper newsroom stood as a benevolent hegemony, blocking the general public from its highly ensconced culture while disseminating the fruits of its labor to those same masses. The modern newsroom is a tightly knit professional culture, complete with its own projected professional identity and authority. The newsroom, and only the newsroom, makes the news. Standing atop the apex of print culture, the newspaper newsroom has established a vertically integrated, hierarchal, modernist institution where only those who conform to its self-regulating standards and practices are allowed access, and all others are kept outside. A conflict has arisen, however, because digital online culture has penetrated the newsroom in the form of the modern online news department. This new department, vital to the future of newspapers, carries with it is own burgeoning sense of professional identity, complete with its own standardized practices and expectations. The newspaper online department has emerged from the distinctly postmodern, horizontally integrated world of the Internet, where expertise can emerge from anywhere and hierarchies are opposed on many levels. The online department presents a unique challenge to the professional authority of the newsroom, and a thorough analysis of this conflict will reveal a number of the underlying preconceptions and assumptions of each culture. Before exploring the two cultures of the newsroom and the online department, however, their histories and developing identities must be examined. Less than one hundred years ago, daily newspapers were the sole source of news and information for the masses of the world. Since Guttenberg's printing press 500 years ago, newspapers have been a permanent fixture in every major European and Asian society, and the institution of the newspaper has achieved full synonymy with the concept of "news" itself. In the United States, newspapers have historically been seen as the "4th Estate of the Government," achieving equal consideration in the pantheon of Congress, the President and the Supreme Court. As we will see in the coming sections, the newsroom has achieved this authority as the "4th Estate of the Government" by challenging the authority of the other three estates. In the past few decades, however, all of that has changed. Over the last 20 years, with the creation and emergence of 24-hour news networks and the World Wide Web, newspapers have struggled greatly in an effort to remain relevant. For every citizen who starts his day by reading a newspaper on his train ride to work, there is another who signs online and reads the same information for free. For every family that turns on the evening news to learn what has happened in the world that day, there is another that watches streaming digital video of the same events from the comforts of their laptops. Mass media in general is declining, and individual preferences have replaced group choices. Every day, readership dwindles among the major newspapers and many experts have predicted a not-too-distant future when the Millennial generation, raised from childhood with the Internet as the primary source for free news and information, becomes the dominant media consumer, sounding the death knell for the age of subscription newspapers. The statistics are not reassuring: the Newspaper Association of America reports that total circulation has declined 13% between 1984 and 20031 and the trend shows no signs of slowing. The following figure shows the absolute circulation cresting in 1984 and falling thereafter. Figure 1: Weekday Circulation in Steady Decline After 1984 http://www.stateofthenewsmedia.org/images/narrative_charts/newspapers/audience_a.jpg Between television and the Internet, the next generation of news consumers has been raised from a young age on an environment of free information, and newspapers are feeling the effects more and more each year. More than ever before, the Internet has been systematically usurping traditional features of newspapers –classified advertising, job listings and movie reviews for instance- and newspapers are losing the additional revenue 1 http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB111499919608621875- 72vA7sUkzSQ76dPiTXytqgOMS5A_20050601.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top streams from these declining aspects alongside their declining circulations. Today, websites like Craigslist2 and Monster 3 have replaced newspaper classified ads and help wanted postings with free online services. Countless other features have found digital reincarnations in recent years. For example, where the previous generation looked for relationships in a newspaper's "Personals" section, the current generation posts their descriptions and searches for friends on MySpace4 and Facebook 5. These websites challenge some of the most important revenue sources for newspapers, and this is having serious effects on the business of newspapers, but what newspapers fear the most is not